Casa Systems tapped Spirent Communication’s test platform to put its next generation cable modem termination system (CMTS) and integrated converged cable access platform (CCAP) products through their paces.

The Spirent TestCenter was used to validate routing performance, asymmetric throughput, latency and packet loss of Casa Systems’ C10G and C3200 platforms.

“We needed to verify throughput and performance of our CMTS and CCAP solutions,” said Nanying Yin, vice president of technology at Casa Systems. “We chose Spirent for our mission critical testing because they have a proven ability in scalability testing of data traffic in the data plane and protocol signaling in control planes that emulate real deployment environments.”

The Spirent test bed consisted of 120 1G and 10 10G test ports. This test setup was used to perform packet loss, latency and asymmetric throughput testing of the Casa CMTS system using built-in test wizards. The asymmetric throughput testing was necessary to accurately validate a CMTS by subjecting it to realistic bi-directional traffic. In addition, access, routing and MPLS protocols were also validated on the Casa CMTS system.

The cable industry’s CCAP initiative will be front and center at next month’s Cable Show in Washington D.C. Other players in the CCAP space include Cisco, Arris/Motorola, Harmonic and CommScope.

On the cable operator front, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are working towards CCAP deployments late this year or early next year. Comcast has conducted field deployments ahead of expected larger rollouts this year.

To date Casa’s success has largely been overseas with its CMTS products, but it could emerge as a CCAP contender with both Time Warner Cable and Comcast.